Which I agree with, but his recommendation, to use endnotes, I find much more more distracting: what havoc is played with ones grasp of the thread of a text when one fumbles in the back of the book for several seconds finding the note in order to see whether it is the one footnote in ten that is essential to the text.

6 Answers
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I don't mind footnotes if they are of the sort that are shown at the bottom of each page, so I only need to move my eyes down a bit to figure out what the footnote is trying to tell me.

As for endnotes, the ones that are only explained at the end of the chapter or, worse, at the end of the book -- I can't fathom who actually reads these because they are so much work for the reader. You'd have to be quite dedicated.

In any case, footnotes are at best a novelty and should be used with restraint. The reader should be (pleasantly) surprised every time they see one.

For endnotes, I prefer the ones at the end of the book. It's much easier to flip back and forth between a page and the back of the book rather than one page and another that's in the middle of the book.
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waiwai933Apr 26 '11 at 18:31

I use foot-notes, if at all, for explanatory material that cannot be fit in-line, but that would help the reader with understanding what he is reading; end-notes are for citations -- the dead-tree equivalent of hyperlinks.

Exactly this. I hate having to have a second bookmark in a book to flip back and forth constantly for explanatory material. Citations are rarely relevant to me as a reader as I'm going through the text, although they can be very useful later if I am using the text for reference or research.
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Lauren IpsumApr 19 '11 at 12:10

I'm familiar with these under the name marginal notes. It's a good point - the textual excursion is smaller with them - but they make for more complex page layout.
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Charles StewartApr 29 '11 at 14:10

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I have seen sidenotes/marginal notes used for quick glossary entries for poetry (including plays written in verse like Shakespeare's), where parenthetic inclusion would imply that such was part of the original text (though square brackets would solve that problem) and would disrupt the verse. Marginal notes also fit better with verse in reducing layout issues—line breaks are fixed in verse, so it might be less distracting to have excess margin or even to change the right margin (where notes are placed) by changing left margin.
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Paul A. ClaytonMay 2 '14 at 13:44

The way you're avoiding notes depends on the type of writing you're doing. Most of the time it is painful and not worthwhile.

If you can explain facts in parenthesis, do so. If you can explain with some background information that will void the need for notes, do so. If you can integrate into the prose what needs to be said in the notes, you should.

As I said in the beginning, avoiding footnotes can be painful in many cases. For instance, if providing context for the incursions of the Europeans into the Middle East, you'd have to carve a place for an explanation of, say, the start of the Templars. It might not be plausible, in which case a footnote would be best.

EDIT:
Painful to write, I mean. The cited example might be poor, but it was the first thing that popped into my mind.

There are cases where footnotes are best: when their information is not enough in context to write inline, but too compelling to omit. If the reader doesn't read the note, they miss out, but not so much that the meaning of the text is lost.

Painful for whom? The writer or the reader? I certainly see that the footnote is easiest for the writer in your example, but wouldn't the discussion of the incursions be impoverished for a reader who had not made the excursion to the footnote about the Templars? It looks like a case where the writer really should make the text linear.
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Charles StewartApr 29 '11 at 14:08